My next chapter…

Making career choices is never an easy thing to do as there is no manual or guide book that helps you along the way. But like with most things in life, we take the millions of different pieces of information and form a conclusion that makes sense personally. I have been with VMware for 3 years now, and words can’t describe how awesome the ride has been, and how great it has been to be a part of such an awesome company/technology. I can’t speak highly enough of the great people and the personal friendships that I have had the opportunity to form while working here. But opportunities do come along, and some you find a deep sense of magnetic allure that you just can’t shake. Those are the opportunities that you have to go after. I have decided to accept a position with Tintri as a senior systems engineer (pre-sales) covering my local patch.

Tintri has piqued my interest for quite some time now, and the more I dug into the technology I was literally blown away by the innovation that they are bringing to the table. There is a lot of disruption in the storage industry recently, and Tintri is one of the newer players that is bringing a big change in the way that we look at VMware and storage. Tintri has taken a step back from the normal methods and constructs in which we manage storage, and completely re-defined the approach on how we should be treating virtual machine workloads when they interface with the storage subsystem. You are no longer are bound to conventional storage management mechanisms such as LUN’s and volumes, but actually now manage the virtual machines directly on the storage array, which simplifies a lot of the complexities in the storage stack. Combine this new approach with a hybrid SSD/HDD array and does both de-dup and compression on the fly, and you have something that is quite remarkable.

The Tintri VMstore visualization is a very powerful tool for VMware administrators. One can quickly gain insight into the top performance issues with the click of a button (in the VIC client). See screenshot below. Combine all of these things together (along with some other roadmap items that are coming) and you have a very powerful solution that will solve a big pain point that most of my customers deal with on a daily basis.